My day job is in the field of web security. I assess websites for vulnerabilities. In other words, I imagine I’m a hacker and then look for bugs that could theoretically be used in a scam. I engage in some of the same activities as IRL “cyber terrorists,” but I’m doing it as part of a service my employer offers to other organizations.

In some ways, you could describe me as a very suspicious person. I’ve purchased books by Marx, Kropotkin, and the Unabomber, at various points. I’ve downloaded Osama bin Laden’s emails from the CIA website, because they’re historical documents that were interesting to look at.

It’s worse than that. I’m a vegan and I guess I’m an anarchist, and my grad school advisor was harassed by the ALF (including the burning of his car), a bona fide ecoterrorist group.

I genuinely fear for my safety in the future, based on my reading and writing habits, because of all the mean and dumb people. This is Janeane Garofalo in 2003, describing what are still today’s politics:

The Republican Party, their message and their policies of exclusion and the tilted playing field appeals to the dumb and the mean. There is no shortage of dumb and mean people in this culture. So, therefore, their message, the dumb and the mean find a nice home in the GOP. This dumbing down and this pseudo patriotism, which is very conveniently partisan, because the dumb and the mean love patriotism. Now the dumb believe unto patriotism because it’s really-when it’s as unexamined as it is for the dumb, it’s merely narcissism. Yeah, it’s my country right or wrong. Well what of these colors don’t run? What do you mean? I don’t know.

They use the word evildoer with a straight face, knee jerk reactionary phrases that go down well from the Republican Party with the dumb and the mean and then the mean pretend that it’s unpatriotic to be critical of your government. You don’t let the facts get in the way of your arrogance and belligerence. You just keep saying no, it doesn’t or you just lie about everything. What you have now is people that are closet racists, misogamists, homophobes and people who love tilted playing fields and the politics of exclusion identifying as conservative. They have hijacked that name and somehow they are proud of it. I don’t understand that, why they’re proud of being conservative but that is seems to be the case.

There is no liberal media. If there was a liberal media that would be good and our culture would reflect it. We can no longer tolerate anti-intellectualism. We can no longer tolerate liberal bashing and we can no longer tolerate the politics of the dumb and the mean. Thank you.

There’s already been a lot of commentary about Ahmed Mohammad’s homemade clock ordeal. Similar things have been happening in the UK. For example:

A postgraduate student of counter-terrorism was falsely accused of being a terrorist after an official at Staffordshire University had spotted him reading a textbook entitled Terrorism Studies in the college library.

Mohammed Umar Farooq, who was enrolled in the terrorism, crime and global security master’s programme, told the Guardian that he was questioned about attitudes to homosexuality, Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida.

His replies, Farooq said, were largely academic but he stressed his personal opposition to extremist views. However, the conversation in the library was reported by the official to security guards, because it had raised “too many red flags” .

So there was a non-extremist Muslim personally working to address the problem of Islamic terrorism, sort of like people are always badgering non-extremist Muslims to do…

To a certain kind of stupid person, it’s thoughtcrime to put yourself in the shoes of terrorists, end of story. The consequences are absurd. Nobody in the situation stopped to ask themselves: “If I were a terrorist who’s used to being surrounded by suspicious white people, would I sit in a public place with a book that says ‘terrorism’ on it?” Obviously not, since the government is telling people to keep an eye out for extremists like yourself! You’d have to be soooo bad at terrorism to get busted that way. I think what’s happening is that racists are so scared of minorities that their thinking is actually impaired while dealing with them.

According to court documents, the boy was in a French class at the Central Foundation school in May 2015 and took part in a discussion, conducted mostly in French, about the environment. The teacher and pupils were said to have discussed those who use violence to protect the planet.

The teenager mentioned that some people use the term “ecoterrorist” to describe those who take action such as spiking trees with nails to prevent chainsaws from chopping them down.

A few days later he was pulled out of class and taken to an “inclusion centre” elsewhere in the school. During this meeting the schoolboy said one adult sat behind him, and another in front of him, whom he had not seen before. That person was a child protection officer, the Guardian has learned, who had been called in to establish if concerns about terrorism were legitimate.

The boy who wishes not to be named, told the Guardian: “I didn’t know what was going on. They said there had been safety concerns raised. If you are taken out of French class and asked about Isis, it is quite scary. My heart skipped a beat.”

He said he was baffled how mentioning the phrases “L’ecoterrorisme”, which he had learned from an earlier session of the school debating society, led to him being asked whether he supported Isis.

The boy and his parents say he was asked if he was “affiliated” with Isis. The school said he was asked if he had heard of the terrorist group, according to legal papers filed by his mother. The boy’s mother said her son came home from school “visibly distressed”.

When I was on the debate team in 10th grade, I once took a position (ran a kritik) based on the Unabomber manifesto. We shouldn’t do the affirmative’s plan, because it’s part of industrial society and therefore taking our freedom and dignity away. Instead, we need to overthrow the government(s), because revolution is more effective than reform.

I repeat: my day job as an adult is to help websites protect themselves from hacktivists.

You would have to be so ignorant to connect ISIS and the Earth Liberation Front. THESE PEOPLE?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvh1SnnPQ_M
Would anyone that’s not a moron believe sympathizing with one implies sympathizing with the other? It’s even more stupid than the idea of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda cooperating.

It’s terrifying to be at the mercy of people like that. You can’t reason with them. They won’t listen. They’re prone to arbitrary acts of violence. They’re sexual sadists. It’s fucked up. And the white people feel safer around them.